I've been a googling and seent hat you can buy media kits only for £20 upwards but obviously this isn't any good as it has no licence therefore won't install properly but then i saw this and wondered what it is?

what exactly is a volume licence? am i being stupid or could you buy a media kit for £20 and one of these volume licence's for £20 and get vista for under £50 delivered?

It says UPG (upgrade), so I presume it requires a previous proper copy of some sort. Other than that, I don't know

we currently have vista home premium but after speaking to my brother thats a busniess type edition and not meant for home use.

cheapest i have seen is dabs.com at £109.60 delivered

Volume licences are for corporate administrators.. you cant just buy one.

Cheapest way for a normal punter is an OEM licence.... just have to buy a bit o hardware with it (media centre remote is usually a good one)

the OEM ver of Vista Home premium 64bit is about 63quid inc vat from scan.

m$ do offer free upgrades to 64bit versions but its only for people who buy the retail version... which is almost four times the price (just underr 200 quid)

ps.. why the feck do you want to bother with 64bit.. its useless!

because 32bit won't let us use all our ram amongst other things :(

because 32bit won't let us use all our ram amongst other things :(

And is your RAM usage actually that high? I appreciate you probably have more RAM than the OS will normally use (4GB available, only 3GB seen by OS), but if your memory usage never goes above say 2GB, then there's no issue.

On the other hand, do you have a 64 bit driver for every bit of hardware in and out of your PC?

Graphics cards are easy, sound cards are not too bad but what about that eluse scanner you use? If you can't get a true 64 bit driver for it, it won't work.

So the potential hardware incompatibility issues far outweigh the benefit of using 64bit OS at the moment, IMHO

ps.. why the feck do you want to bother with 64bit.. its useless!

Rubbish - it's only the Intel/PC version of it that's useless

Chris

Vista home premium is the version for us here at home. Vista business, is for the office.

The cheapest and easiest legal way is to get hold of an oem copy from ebuyer, and you want "Home Premium".

Prior to running vista 32bit at home, I used XP 64bit without any real problems at all. I am already toying with switching to vista 64bit for my desktop machine.

Gah! 64 bit... all i can say is annoying!!

I used xp 64 bit and ran into problem after problem... maybe in the future a bit... when/if everything switches to 64bit support.

But i remember having two versions of internet explorer... a 32bit and a 64bit... because things like adobe flash player and java didn't work properly with the 64bit version....

And i couldn't use my laser printer any more... and i couldn't use my sound card anymore... and to top it all off... no noticeable performance or speed increase!! so in all... not worth the hassle at the moment i say!!!

because 32bit won't let us use all our ram amongst other things :(

Have you tried PAE? (physical address extension)

Its six and two threes really, depending what you use your PC for.. you may find that your computer runs fine with PAE enabled.. or you may find that things sometimes dont work right because of naff drivers (ive read about problems with soundblaster X-Fi and hauppage tv cards for instance)

64bit isnt really ideal for a "home" computer because you may have problems getting 64bit drivers for all your kit... with Vista its much better than it was with XP, but still not something i would bother with personally.. my bro tried vista 64bit on his main pc and eventually went back to 32bit because of random problems/crashes.

Rubbish - it's only the Intel/PC version of it that's useless

Chris

Yeah... lets all switch to PowerPC then :P

Yeah... lets all switch to PowerPC then :P

Excellent - so how many shall I put you down for?

Chris

Cheapest way for a normal punter is an OEM licence.... just have to buy a bit o hardware with it (media centre remote is usually a good one)

How much are mice these days

we have a new computer(maybe 9 months old), no external hardware except an external hard disj and an HP printer thats maybe 3 years old.

Bengie, if you're having trouble using all your RAM, make sure that your motherboard *properly* supports it before splashing out on a new version of Windows to try & fix it.

How much memory are we talking about it?

we now have 4gb in the board which is the maximum of the board. bios shows 4gb but thanks to being 32bit vista only shows 3gb.

but aswell as that i would like at some point to get a core2quad Q6600 which would probably work better and more efficiently on 64bit.

What's the model of the board?

er............i'll have to look.

if you need to have a 64bit os why not look at either linux or os x?

At least they actually work

The ability to use 4GB of memory is limited by several factors, some of them to do with your motherboard's chipset, some to do with the architecture of the OS you're using (32/64) and some artificial limits imposed by MS becuase they found some drivers written for a 32-bit environment choked on physical address extensions.

Get yourself on MSN

if you need to have a 64bit os why not look at either linux or os x?

At least they actually work

That's not really a helpful comment. The pre-Santa Rosa Macbook Pros as sold as Apple's top of the range laptop until about July this year, for instance (I can't come up with a better way of describing them) can use a maximum of 3GB RAM despite using OSX. And of course you can't choose your own, suitable, hardware if you want to use OSX in the same way as Bengie is considering upgrading his PC.

if you need to have a 64bit os why not look at either linux or os x?

At least they actually work

though to be fair, 10.5 isn't looking particularly pukka is it

That's not really a helpful comment. The pre-Santa Rosa Macbook Pros as sold as Apple's top of the range laptop until about July this year, for instance (I can't come up with a better way of describing them) can use a maximum of 3GB RAM despite using OSX. And of course you can't choose your own, suitable, hardware if you want to use OSX in the same way as Bengie is considering upgrading his PC.

Who said that it had to be intel though? G5's will happily give you 4Gb+

Plus his current machine will run Linux will it not? I thought it was a vaild comment.

Bengie - Why whats up with 10.5:confused:

we currently have vista home premium but after speaking to my brother thats a busniess type edition and not meant for home use.

cheapest i have seen is dabs.com at £109.60 delivered

Look on Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK it's there OEM for about £60 inc VAT.

Vista Home Premium is £61.98 inc VAT for the 32 bit or £63.60 for the 64 bit, so long as you buy a bit of hardware too.